Pitfalls
The only downfalls of my experience lay in the academic adjustments i had to make in order to progress in my classes properly. The politics of having international students was always prominent in our classes. For an international exchange student to fail their course- they would have to had really screwed up, massively. Out of my five classes, I dropped one without actually telling the university i had dropped it- as i was only taking it as an extra course. I took this course, named Video Editing Studio, hoping i would grasp a better idea of how to storyboard and create and release tension through using advanced software. Our tutor was a famous editor for various K-Dramas (Korean Drama series - these are seriously questionable but are a good laugh to watch, there are a handful of good ones) and knew his stuff, but needless to say they definitely have a different technique for building and releasing tension in that it’s a lot more obvious and not as subtle or fluid compared to western drama editing. The course ended up being entirely based around Final Cut Pro 7. This software is good for practising film theory, but it was seriously dated. You can’t actually purchase this software anymore and it is incompatible with recent Mac IOS systems, and there were only 4 Macs available to us to use between 40+ students. You had to give a deposit of 100,000 WON (which is around £70), and each assignment would take around 4-6 hours so it was near impossible to rent them anyway. This was why i ended up dropping this class after only completing the midterms assignments, and no one said anything. I just simply stopped turning up and it was fine apparently. I ACTUALLY PASSED THIS COURSE. Which is an example of how easy they were on international exchange students. They wanted us to ‘have a good time’, and report good things back to our home universities. Which i have to say, definitely worked, especially as it gave me more time to hunt down galleries and go to more design related events around the city. An example of how being an international student could be a different kind of downfall, is my experience of a course in Visual Editing. This was a coding course that worked with Processing, using the language Java. I did end up enjoying this course and the tutor was very helpful and understanding, but it was incredibly challenging. Myself and another exchange student were really struggling; we were set a task each week that we found extremely difficult no matter how small they were, as we were starting from scratch and had not done coding previously. We found out halfway through the semester that for the Korean students - this was their second or third semester taking this class. Meaning they were miles ahead of us anyway. Our tutor had also made it clear to us that we were only allowed 3 absents and that doctors notes would not be accepted. So this class was namely difficult, when the other tutors told us for exchange students it was okay to miss some classes if we wanted to go on trips or anything. But i am glad i took this class, as this was the class i learnt the most in. The other classes were the basics of graphic design - and by the basics i mean how to open a file in photoshop. We were told at our first class that it would be too easy for us and we should take something else, to which we said that there were no other classes we could take for our major. But the tutors said we were allowed to complete our own projects they could help us with, and honestly these classes filled in a lot of holes in my education. I love the course at UWE, but it is mostly practical and we were assumed to have known all the theory- which it turns out i didn’t. So these classes felt like a top up on my design skills and how to design to a high standard.